1.3 KiB
Using spmenu with GNOME
The GNOME desktop environment works perfectly with spmenu if you are using an X11 session. If you're using a Wayland session however, it gets a little more complicated.
GNOME, more specifically Mutter does not implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol spmenu and other programs like it use. According to them it's because that is not how GNOME is designed to work, so it's not the right place for this either. (#973). This is very frustrating, and as a result spmenu cannot run as a native Wayland program on GNOME, it's not possible. Thanks GNOME.
However, spmenu can still be used on Wayland using X11 and XWayland. If you're
using a version of spmenu released after commit ebd625ba1e, spmenu will
automatically check for GNOME Wayland based on whether the
$GNOME_SETUP_DISPLAY variable is exported. If you're on an older version of
spmenu or the variable just isn't set, you can open up
~/.config/spmenu/spmenu.conf and set protocol to 0, forcing X11 mode to
be used.
Thankfully, in X11 mode GNOME treats spmenu like an overlay anyway, unlike wlroots based compositors so running spmenu in XWayland likely isn't going to be noticeable, even if it's less than ideal. But hey, at least you get to keep some X11 specific features, which cannot be ported over to Wayland.